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Home Connections Have to Be 'Painless'

The hype surrounding the Internet of Things (IoT) in the home is growing rapidly, according to Gartner, as the battle for the IoT gateway in the connected home gets underway. "The numerous IoT applications for the home include smart stoves, which tell you how to cook a meal and provide recipes; and smart washers and dryers, which help you determine the optimum time to run a load of laundry," said Paul O'Donovan, principal research analyst at Gartner. 

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1 comment about "Home Connections Have to Be 'Painless'".
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  1. Wayne Caswell from Modern Health Talk, August 13, 2015 at 9:16 p.m.

    If one thing is clear to me here, it’s that Garner researchers have no clue what they’re talking about but are trying to sound like they do so they can sell their market research and consulting services. 

     

    Just because something can be remotely operated or programmed to operate automatically doesn’t make it smart. To be truly “smart,” a device (or a home) must “learn,” but from what we’ve seen so far even learning devices can be quite stupid. Take the NEST thermostat as an example. It supposedly learns your habits & preferences to adjust temperature automatically, but it doesn’t know if you’re cold because you just ate ice cream or hot because you just vacuumed. So you have to adjust the temp manually – how stupid is that? You see, any change of behavior, however small, means smart home devices must be reprogrammed or retaught. That’s not very smart and an impediment to mass-market adoption. 

     

    The reality of the Smart Home marketing hype, and the promise of this “next big thing,” has eluded us for over 50 years, and I see no sign that it’s much closer now than during the 1957 World’s Fair demo of the RCA-Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen. (See http://www.mhealthtalk.com/elusive-smart-home/.) 

     

    The article speaks of smart appliances, but for the most part it makes no sense to put much electronics in white-goods home appliances that otherwise have a useful life of 10-15 years, because the electronics themselves will go obsolete every year or two, and there are far cheaper & better ways to add the functionality developers think we want. (See http://www.mhealthtalk.com/smart-refrigerator/.) 

     

    The article also says, “the gateway is becoming the ‘centre’ for connecting the different devices and home appliances,” but that promise has also been around for more than 15 years. The first work to define gateway standards began with a whitepaper I helped write while still at IBM, and earlier gateways existed before that. (See http://www.slideshare.net/waynecaswell/intersection-gateways and http://mhealthtalk.com/cazitech/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/RG-report1.pdf). 

     

    Some of the gateway standards of that era included TIA TR41.5 (a telecom standard), OSGI (Open Service Gateway initiative), and HomeRF (a now-defunct wireless standard that once dominated the home network market before being replaced by Wi-Fi. (see http://mhealthtalk.com/cazitech/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Gateways2.ppt). 

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